Digby NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM RAND CORPORATION JOINT ORAL HISTORY PROJECT ON THE HISTORY OF THE RAND CORPORATION EDITORIAL USE FORM PREFACE This manuscript is based upon a tape-recorded interview conducted by Martin J, Collins on January 14, 1992 The tape and the manuscript are the property of the undersigned: however, the originals and copies are indefinitely deposited, respectively, at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution and at the RAND Corporation. I have read the transcript and have made only minor corrections and emendations. The reader is therefore asked to bear in mind that this manuscript is a record of a spoken conversation rather than a literary product. Though the smithsonian Institution and the RAND Corporation may use these materials for their own purposes as they deem appropriate, I wish to place the condition as selected below upon the use of this interview material by others and I understand that the smithsonian Institution and the RAND Corporation will make reasonable efforts to enforce the condition to the extent possible. CONDITIONS (Check one) v PUBLIC. THE MATERIAL MAY BE MADE AVAILABLE TO AND MAY BE USED BY ANY PERSON FOR ANY LAWFUL PURPOSE. OPEN. This manuscript may be read and the tape heard by persons approved by the Smithsonian Institution or by the RAND Corporation. The user must agree not to quote from, cite or reproduce by any means this material except with the written permission of the Smithsoniar or. RAND. MY PERMISSION REQUIRED TO QUOTE, CITE OR :?;,; : >'1~0DUCE. This manuscript and the tape are open to !:!;;..:a.i~ination as above. The user must agree not to quote from, cite or reproduce by any means this material except with the written permission of the Smithsonian or RAND in which permission I must join. Upon my death this interview becomes open. EDITORIAL CSE FORM (CONT.} MY PERMISSION REQUIRED FOR ACCESS. - must give writen permission before the manus c~~ pt or tape can be utilized other than by Smithsonian or RAND staff =or official Smithsonian or RAND purposes. Also my permission is required to quote, cite or reproduce by any means. Upon my dea~h the interview becomes open. - ~ r. v~~ (S'gnature) ~ Mr. James Digby (Name, typed) I A)~ 1'(: (Date) James Digby January 14, 1992 TAPE 1, SIDE 1 1-2 Purpose of RAND Strategic Air Power Project, partly in response to fragmentation of RAND work. Roles of Digby, Herman Kahn, Albert Wohlstetter. Power of RAND division heads. 2-4 Continuing tension within RAND between integration across disciplines and smaller projects. Development of program management structure. 4-6 Diversity of views within RAND on nuclear strategy. Issues of research style, differences between Wohlstetter and engineers, later between engineers and associates of Robert McNamara. References to T. Finley Burke, William B. Graham, Natalie Crawford. 6-7 Digby's recollections of Frank Collbohm, Hans Speier, Bernard Brodie, John Williams, Robert Specht. 8 Contribution of engineers, later sense of exclusion. 8-9 Larry Henderson's role as intermediary between Wohlstetter and Air Force, Henderson's relations with Herman Kahn. 9-10 Frank Collbohm's disinterest in civil defense as an area for RAND. RAND interest in passive defense. 10-11 RAND approach to disarmament. References to Louis Sohn, Thomas Schelling. TAPE 1, SIDE 2 11-12 Collbohm's attitudes towards disarmament studies, and influence of Hans Speier. Perspective of Air Force. 12-13 Digby's perspectives on the "RAND strategy." Contrast between Air Force and Department of Defense acceptance of RAND strategic ideas. Roles of McNamara, Charles Hitch, Alain Enthoven. 13 War games and kriegspiel. Wohlstetter mentioned. 13-15 Digby's perspective on RAND turning points: formation of social science department, systems analysis, concept of deterrence, counterforce, increasing public role, influence on NATO strategy. -DIGBY-1 Interviewee: Mr. James Digby Interviewer: Mr. Martin Collins Date: January 14, 1992 Place: RAND Corporation Santa Monica, California TAPE 1, SIDE 1 MR. COLLINS: I wanted to follow up some odds and ends from our previous discussions. I wanted to get a little clearer sense of the Strategic Air [Power] Project (SAP) that you'd mentioned, as kind of a follow-on to the Strategic Objectives Committee (SOC) that happened before the SOFS [Strategic Offensive Force Structure] Study. Did any document come out of that, like the soc document (D-2700), "The Next Ten Years," that kind of made a map of problems and potential approaches for RAND work, or was it more informal than that? MR. DIGBY: I don't recall an overall document. And the group was put together more as a management tool. It wasn't on quite as scholarly a basis as the Strategic Objectives Committee, which really thought of itself as reviewing the ingredients for strategic decisions and discussing them and coming out with some conclusions. The Strategic Air Power Project was more of a way of getting RAND projects to work in coordination across the various department lines. COLLINS: Was this something that Frank [Collbohm] asked for? How did this come to happen? In part I ask that because, as you put it, the triumvirate that was leading this, you and Herman Kahn and Albert Wohlstetter, two of those people weren't especially known for their managerial acuity. [Laughter] So it just raises an interesting question of how it came to be and how the group was decided upon. DIGBY: I'm sure it was decided upon in a management committee meeting. Frank must have agreed to it. The initiative more likely came from someone like Charlie [Charles] Hitch. COLLINS: So the selection of the committee members is not something that stands out in your mind. DIGBY: Well, I think Herman and Albert were considered two of -DIGBY-2 the brightest, most vigorous intellects at RAND, but it was widely felt that they were not easy to manage. They didn't do things in an orderly fashion always, as you pointed out just now. I was at that time a department head and was considered somebody who would get along with both of them and could bring a little more order to the projects. I think the triggering impetus for this was, that over the fifties, RAND periodically realized that there was a fractionation of its talents, because there were a lot of incentives to becoming a project leader, and in some sense that's good, because we had quite a large number of very smart people. To give them their head, you had to give them a project, or at least be a co-leader of a project. But that meant that instead of having the few large projects like the [Edward] Barlow projects or the Wohlstetter projects of the early years, we saw that almost every senior person had his own project number and project, and it made it very hard to get consistent, consecutive work done. People would switch from one project to the other, so the Strategic Air Power Project was intended as a way of countering this fractionalization of RAND work, and was meant to run across the department lines and skills in the way that RAND's earlier projects had done. In other words, it was after a period of disintegration, so to speak, into smaller projects. It was meant to be an integrative idea. COLLINS: What were the incentives or mechanisms you had at your disposal to get people to coordinate and cooperate in the fashion that you were describing? DIGBY: The power was almost all vested in the department heads-­ or division heads, they were. We had both divisions and departments then, as I recall. The division heads were all­ powerful in terms of hiring, firing, salaries, and program. The division heads wanted this done. They were generally quite wise people, like Hitch, [James] Lipp, Gene Root--who may have left by that time, Ed Barlow. They gave the Strategic Air Power Project its authority and backed it up. COLLINS: I don't know how well you can respond to this question, but as we've talked over our several discussions, there seems to be this interesting tension between the development of small individual projects, or small group projects, and the desire to bring together the research effort so that it's concentrated on what are broadly perceived as critical problems and issues. I wonder whether you can give me a sense of the balance of this over time and how difficult it was for RAND to bring together these more massive efforts as opposed to what seemed to be an easier thing to do--the smaller group projects. -DIGBY-3 DIGBY: Well, it was certainly something that came up periodically. After the Strategic Air Power Project did its thing--and I can't remember just how it came to an end. It kind of dwindled in some way.--People like Herman [Kahn] and Albert [Wohlstetter] tend to start doing their own thing, regardless of what a management committee may have decided. The integrative effort in the same general area was tried again with Ed Barlow as Director of Projects and Wohlstetter as his deputy, so it's been something that RAND had tried several times. It hapened rather automatically with a few very smart and integrative people in the early fifties, then it happened by design with the Strategic Air Power Project, and then it happened again by design with the director of projects. After that, along came the [RobertS.] McNamara period, and RAND sort of changed in many ways, although I ~uess I was a part of the next attempt to do something like that.